It might save BSkyB but then I don't know if that was ever in…

He will win even more financially if this is enough penance to get the final tick for the BSKYB deal.

Also, I see…

Highly likely. Which would make it rather cheaper to operate, given economies of scale from a 7-day newsroom, common back office, etc. So Murdoch wins out financially.

It's exactly the…

Cameron is almost certainly freaking the fuck out, to put it mildly, because he employed Andy Coulson (one of the major Screws figures) as a PR man & is seen as close to Murdoch and especially Brooks. This…

Quite possibly, but a full Public Inquiry still needs to be held- and…

Ugh.

Frankly, I don't know if Miliband won't come to regret calling for a public inquiry into the dealings of the evil media. May well turn up some toads a…

I actually understand where he’s coming from. But the “hundred stories” he’s talking about represent the real work of investigative journalism – the persistence and hacking away over time. Nick Davies didn’t know when he started what extraordinary things the story held.

Wikileaks doubtless played an important role in Peruvian…

Assange was still saying…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/06/news-world-investigator-families-dead-soldiers

But pretty much everything from this section makes for grim and at times sickening reading:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/phone-hacking

Either way, it’s a phenomenal effort from the Guardian team- they deserve all the…

And yet, the book says, Davies’ work:

had previously been denounced by Assange as a contemptible attempt by “sanctimonious handwringing … politicians and social elites” to claim a right to privacy. Assange had accused Davies of “a lack of journalistic solidarity” for criticising the News of the World – calling…

Honestly, what made the SST think that that was a sensible approach? Will seriously backfire, I’d say.

http://thinkprogress.org/2011/02/10/lobbyists-chamberleaks/

yowsers.

According to e-mails obtained by ThinkProgress, the [U.S. Chamber of Commerce] hired the lobbying firm Hunton and Williams to spearhead this effort. Hunton And Williams’ attorney Richard Wyatt, who once represented Food Lion in its infamous lawsuit against ABC…

Excellent.

And I can confirm that you were able to do solely because your earlier complaint was drawn to the attention of the appropriate people.

You squeaky wheel, you :-)

In an excerpt of Domscheit-Berg’s upcoming book, Inside WikiLeaks, that was leaked to the document-publishing site Cryptome, an English-language version of several pages states that he and one “architect” of WikiLeaks’ submissions platform took control…

I don’t need to retail my position, but “appalling” and “rape apologist” was my reaction to this condescending head pat from Gordon. (“Privilege douche bingo” also comes to mind.)

**Personally, I do find it depressing that so much…

I think Toby got it spot on – "He's done amazing things, incredibly brave, occasional unusual flourishes"

btw, JA worked out that he needed the professional journalist some time ago – here he…

One note: You and Danyl discussed why the publication of the NZ cables seemed to have "dried up". I'm happy to point out that the __Herald on…

For the comment you quote? Indeed.

The latest Down Under Feminists’ Carnival has a very useful round up to feminist responses to various kinds of rape apology in the Assange case.

I read the post on Gordon Campbell's Scoop article and wonder whether the poster actually read Gordon's piece. http://gordoncampbell.scoop.co.nz/2011/01/06/gordon-campbell-reviews-the-general-response-to-wikileaks/

Just as Assange’s personal behaviour…

Good to see.

From B Jones’ link:

Other taskforce proposals include giving judges the ability to direct juries … that “beyond reasonable doubt” does not mean “no doubt” the accused is guilty.

Hmm, I’d definitely say most of the other suggestions made should…

Um, yes, and it's rather disturbing to see a very smart and respected man like Geoffrey Robinson [[http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/feb/07/julian-assange-prosecutor/|accusing the prosecutor of "anti-male bias" on…

AND the versions of series 6 episode 1 on iTunes has more content than the version on TV on Demand

What a stupid bloody mess.

"One day we'll…

Media 7 playback on demand works for me today, but I don't know if that is because TVNZ have fixed things, or just that I am in a different country (works in Singapore, not in Saudi).

And thanks to Simon GRigg – I am now subscribing…

It occurred to me afterwards that overlapping responses may have been the problem. Sorry to be unnecessarily sarcastic.

I don't know much about Sweden's legal system, but our one certainly seems to me to be less than perfectly…

You mean apart from the bit where his lawyers alleged the complainants were in the pay of the CIA?

Sorry, B, I guess I…

You mean apart from the bit where his lawyers alleged the complainants were in the pay of the CIA?

I’m not sure that it has been established, though.…

Yep, and as I’ve said before, even if Assange is eventually tried in Sweden, and found not guilty, we should not conclude that the women…

Yes, but in this case, given the wording "Not only had it been the world’s worst screw, it had also been violent" I take it to refer to…

If both parties consider it fun, it’s fun, it doesn’t matter what you or I think. I don’t think finding physical restriction erotically satisfying is…

I call sexual contact without a person's consent 'violence' ("behaviour involving physical force intended to hurt" OED), but I get the importance of these…

Okay, firstly, I don’t think Key’s comment…

And it's worth noting the same documents translated by Juha Saarinen also don't speak well of the competence of the Swedish police.

I think what's…

I'm not entirely sure if that couldn't be taken to mean "violent sex" rather than "sexual violence". Do you get the distinction? I don't really get why people like rough sex, but it's not the least…

Sally, similar to Paul above, I agree with a lot of what you say, but we should keep in mind Assange himself has denied any wrong doing and the claims made against him remain just that so far – claims. If the claims of the women…

Yes. It does annoy me that people still fixate on a couple of tweets when she contemporaneously told friends — who were later subsequently interviewed by police — things that seem to bear out her later police statement.

I hadn’t either until I read this description of the claims:

__That evening, Miss A held a party at her flat. One of her friends, “Monica”, later told police that during the party Miss A had…

Dean Lonegan's a fuckwit and a former Kiwi League player, not All Black.

Okay, not quite the last word. There is nothing…

Asleep, no (unless prenegotiated I suppose). But pinned down? Unless your mouth is also held shut, you can surely say yes or no. And you can struggle to show dissent.

I'm not suggesting I know what happened in the room. But…

Seems fair to note that the firms involved will have got the idea about sowing dissent in Wikileaks from the well-documented dissent in Wikileaks, which I don't think was…

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/02/data-intelligence-firms-proposed-attack-wikileaks/

Now, I've got to go have a cry because Geoffrey Robertson has taken a long, stinky dump on whatever respect I used to have for the man.

That would be John Hartevelt of The Press. He must have some interesting conversations in airports.

It's podcast on iTunes

Snap! What a freakshow. The cast of characters in that article runs the gamut from 'deluded and douchey' to 'actively evil'. Haggis weirds me out, too. I think he's horribly revisionist about himself in that interview.

Psychopath…

I'd have a problem identifying you as that. Thank you for your post – I found it illuminating.

Which shouldn’t be happening, but sometimes does. I’ve notified the appropriate people.

It’ll also end up on YouTube,…

Older episodes are on the Media7 channel

How much do you get for the international rights Russell?

And when is this silliness going to end?…

Of course. Good call.

I’m very reluctant to go there because of stuff like this. I'm not qualified to diagnose neurotypical cognition in anyone, but the reports of his extradition hearing suggest something much more banal.

“Hmmm, I seem to be holding a knife, there’s a dead body at my feet and I’m covered in blood. Hmmm. I must be a serial killer, which is rather interesting… I feel that it is absolutely necessary that I take a sample, date it and file it away…

Saw a couple of articles saying that Aspies are too sensitive and not able to filter out emotional…

I just a little ambivalent about this. On one hand, as I quip to people, I don’t suffer from Asperger’s, I enjoy it – it’s the rest of you that I find insufferable.

A bit more seriously, alluding to the nature versus nurture…

But I was a bit reluctant…

I quite like the way Aspergers seems to be quietly shaping the modern world.

From ‘Maxims For Revolutionists’ by George Bernard Shaw

Yes, me too, but it seemed to be overdoing it to put it in the review. I do…

I feel a bit mean in being joyed about that, but then I remember how she went to jail to protect a source, where the source wasn't so much 'leaking' classified information as they were…

Wowzers. Although hardly surprising from the criminal enterprise that is the Russian government.

I'm hoping he hasn't got a whole lot of stuff in Moscow…

Even if…

At the end of it he talks about going back to his job as the Guardian's Moscow correspondent. But that's not going to happen now.

I’m not sure even that’s true in a retail news sense. My…

Apologies to the whole death defying journalistic movement for my comments. Of…

Hah!

I need to drop this,…

HuffPo? A site which doesn't pay most of its writers and has done precisely zero original reporting on this story? Seriously?

Read the book if you want to find out how much value working journalists added to this project.

For god's sake, Don, the biggest risk faced by HuffoPo bloggers…

You can just imagine that scream of confession at Gitmo: "OK, OK, enough. It's My Heart Must Go On, from her latest Greatest Hits album. Now please stop playing her songs!"

No, but it could be cheaper to break into that room than break the encryption. There might be a few beatings along the way.

Of course the terrorists don't care – they can use 1-way pads distributed by the world's music industry…

Is objecting to defamation really the same thing as objecting to leaks? Wasn't he saying that the claims were false, rather than that they were in confidence? If so then I'm not sure I see the irony.

On the 'informants' stuff, (and without saying I…

Okay, here is the actual quote, from Keller's essay:

But while I…

Obligatory XKCD reference.

ETA: This is also why people who have high-level clearances are subjected to travel restrictions. The people who design the security systems that interact with…

Simmer down, just even throwing the idea of computer security in there leads to thinking about alternative angles to the problem. Computer security is, after all, mostly about secrets, and how to keep them.

Although, as in "meat space", even computer security is not entirely…

Power and wealth seeks privacy and secrecy, and abhors public scrutiny

This is *the* fundamental issue that WL is addressing.

Laurence Millar's fuller take of the impact of Wikileaks is well worth a read.

http://globalvillagegovernance.blogspot.com/2011/02/small-earthquake-in-media-not-many-dead.html

A wiser man would never have suggested the comparison, however.

It was an analogy, a not a bad one. Of course you can reduce any analogy to absurdity if you want to – but that is not the purpose they serve. Do you really think, for example, that the "terrorists"…

The New York Times’ role has been important in bringing these stories to Americans

I think the NYT has behaved in a reprehensible and self serving manner. The way they have attempted to undermine the freedom of speech defence for WL ("they don't count as journalists") is about as shoddy…

A wiser man would never have suggested the comparison, however.

However, more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed in a war of dubious legality; and we would probably not know that without…

#Assange is NOT sueing the #Guardian for libel. His lawyer Mark Stephens confirms apparently. I'm relieved to find Julian is not a hypocrite.

Indeed. A wise man once said "the real world cannot be reduced to a cryptographic style problem"

I expect you could get the answer by perusing the Most Investment in P.R. Index

Don, please don't turn into another Whale Oil... that's a really stupid thing to say.

What was I supposed to say? "Enemy combatants"? ;-)

All being well, I'm interviewing the pair of them together on the Media7 Webstock special.

The worst deals we pay for as taxpayers are the massive ones with huge multi-nationals that fall very short in terms of value and have zero transparency.

At least NZ doesn't buy much in the way of military hardware. Secrecy upon secrecy – commercial confidence and "matters of state" -…

we learned that the White House had pressured Sweden to take action or end up in being trade embargoed like Cuba(!). In Sweden it’s actually illegal for politicians to decide which individual cases the police or…

Low cost, high quality, ready tomorrow; pick two.

Ready in time for the Rugby World ...?

When you consider that government = us, it's a very interesting question. Can we get an economist up in here?

I think it would depend on the tender. For a road or something equally boring, where your costs are labour and materials plus a spot of margin, just stumping up wouldn’t hurt too bad.…

They wouldn't tender? Just walk away…

A thought: which countries would top the Honesty in Foreign Policy Index?

Be nice if MFAT announced that all treaty negotiations, starting with TPPA, were going to be conducted with absolute openness short of opening the meetings up to public attendance. Daily summaries, public input on talking points, public input on bottom-line negotiating positions,…

There's nothing to say a country can't conduct almost entirely open and properly democratic foreign affairs. Not that I've…

I had a good laugh earlier today reading the rules of the New World Order…

Oh, come on. We all know the Illuminati and the Elders of Zion are behind WL, pulling the puppet strings of the establishment press to ensure their nefarious control of the NWO is not revealed. That's why Assange was set up with trumped-up rape charges so…

I found the commentary from Zimbabweans under the Op piece from the US DOD blogger (name escapes) who first attacked Wikileaks over…

The information noted by Jon was of that order.

A…

No, not that sort of story. Just grubby Sunday paper bizness.

Let's just hope we're not being primed for another Operation Leaf...

One of the obvious ones is commercial confidence. Companies will be loathe to tender on state contracts if they know that their pricing models and terms will be available to…

And held to account they should be.

But there's been a good deal of absolutist rhetoric expressed since we all started talking about Wikileaks, and…

There's no proof that the government lied to us, merely that they didn't communicate the fullness of the…

I hear the bar is also nice.

That is problematic, and from my understanding the failure of some stories to appear is indeed a failure at certain news organisations.

Er, Hager can publish on the web, can't he?

BTW, I should also have said, nice review and analysis. Agree about the Davies/Assange tiff. Egos colliding, I guess.

What it comes down to, really, is "do you trust the people who are deciding what stays secret and what doesn't?". And the goal, sometimes,…

Woah. You're talking about some very, very good journalists here. Leigh faced down an intimidating lawsuit from the corrupt British MP Jonathan Aitken, stood by his impeccably-researched story — and saw Aitken eventually jailed…

Has this ever happened?

You never said you were throwing me a surprise party! Oh, wait.

They also have the knowledge and contacts to know what the story is. I was surprised by how…

These seem to have dried up. I guess Hager is either sitting on them for the election campaign or writing another book.

It's pretty frustrating, and certainly one reason I am sure WL wanted more out than less. Journalists have their own, often narrow, agendas which are not generally those…

I'd have thought it was about as clear as it could be, even from the excerpt. The two Guardian journalists raised the issue of redaction over dinner with Assange,…

‘Well, they’re informants,’ he said. ‘So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.’

We have no idea whether quotes like the one above are taken out of context or quite what the scenario was. They certainly contradict many of the public statements made by…

Thanks. As I said, the book did also impress upon…

Turns out there's quite a story there. We'll cover it in the show.

These seem to have dried up. I guess Hager is either sitting on them for the election campaign or writing another book.

I think that wraps it up for me as far as my opinion of Mr Assange as a person is concerned.